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Jet Strikes Drone Near Heathrow Airport (marketwatch.com)
smooth wombat writes: "A British Airways flight Sunday appears to have collided with a drone on a flight bound for London's busy Heathrow Airport in what may be the first such incident involving a major airline," according to MarketWatch. "The flight from Geneva, Switzerland to Heathrow, Europe's busiest hub, is believed to have struck a drone, the London Metropolitan Police said in a statement. The plane landed safely following the incident, which occurred around 12:50 p.m. local time. 'It was only a matter of time before we had a drone strike given the huge numbers being flown around by amateurs who don't understand the risks and the rules,' said BALPA flight safety specialist Steve Landells... 'Much more education of drone users and enforcement of the rules is needed to ensure our skies remain safe from this threat'."
I hope everybody is ok. This bodes very poorly for drone ultraregulation and enforcement. As the summary says, it was only a matter of time.
There has been no evidence presented that it hit a drone. Just speculation at this point
Of course I get all my aerospace news from MarketWatch... However, other sources suggest the pilots saw it bounce off the nose:
After landing, the pilot reported an object - believed to be a drone - had struck the front of the Airbus A320.
As someone who works at a major Air Force bace that flies "heavies", I can tell you that often there is no physical damage and the only way to confirm a "bird strike" is the blood left behind, and small drones do not have blood.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Why should a Chinese manufacturer know the rules of operation for your region of the world? It's not the manufacturer's responsibility because they aren't flying your drone for you nor do they know the specific rules or situation of your locale. You are and you should know that.
The bilingual (Chinese/Chinglish) manual makes me understand how to operate the thing, but not a single word about safety. Just adding legal limits (e.g. minimum distance from airports, maximum height, distance from buildings - or even links to national web sites where such rules are explained) of where to fly them would be a great improvement.
Here's a "common sense" suggestion that really shouldn't have to be in the manual: Don't fly your drone in the approach path of an airport.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If shooting them down is illegal then running them down with a 747 has to be illegal too.
Nullius in verba
There are lots of "common sense" things, especially in US manuals, such as don't iron clothes on your body or while taking a bath.
Obviously plenty of people need reminders.
Putting in a general notice such as "limits may exist in your part of the world, look them up before flying this thing", and maybe even spending a few hours online to get links to rule making bodies in their major export markets, shouldn't be too much to ask.
There are lots of "common sense" things, especially in US manuals, such as don't iron clothes on your body or while taking a bath. Obviously plenty of people need reminders.
If you need to be "reminded" not to fly a drone in the approach path of an airport, you should not be flying a drone. As well, the "reminder" would probably do no do. Flying drones around airports is almost certainly a specific conscious decision.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
...a large bird of pray and those are regularly sucked through jet engines for the entire time such technology has existed. And yet we don't hear about any mitigation efforts. Why? Because there is NO DANGER.
CAPT Sullenberger would beg to differ about the effects of bird strikes. Regardless, airports have robust anti-bird mitigation efforts.
What a moron. We have wait until an airliner crashes, then we do something, right? You'll notice that the thing was not sucked into an engine, and that the 747 was landing, not taking off. If both those criteria had been met then your post might read a little differently. You appear not to notice the research that has been conducted on bird strikes on large jets for many years. You also seem to be unaware of the unlucky passengers of light aircraft who have had large birds land in their laps, along with chunks of perspex and aluminium. The pilots are asking for more research, but you'd rather not find out because, hey, your rights trump everything and everyone.
The biggest danger isn't from birds of prey (at least in the USA); the danger is geese. There are serious geese mitigation efforts near major airports (example), and geese have seriously damaged and even brought down planes before (example).
Did you do any research before posting? I've heard about these mitigation efforts, and I don't know anything about flying. Then again, the word "lazy" is in your handle...
"We don't worry about the dangers of birds"
Excuse me?
Civil aviation spends millions trying to avoid birds near the major airports.
"perhaps it should actually show that small drones that weigh a few pounds really aren't more dangerous to aircraft than birds."
Except that:
1) We know (and act upon) birds *are* quite dangerous to aircraft.
2) We know drones have a distintive characteristic that may make them more dangerous: they have an intelligent will backing them up (i.e.: adding explosives and/or the ability to crash on purpose).
Every other device has grills, why not jet engines? Birds have been causing problems also. Can't ban birds.
Table-ized A.I.
The CE logo is protected, and there are fines for using it withoutwithout certification. So instead they use one that is very similar: In the proper one the circle described by the C intersects the one described by the E such that the outlines (if they were present) would overlap exactly.
Anything that has the other logo is colloquially known as Chinese Export.
What's really dumb is the general public is largely ignorant about the difference. If your house burns down due to a faulty CE certified device you can have redress. If your house burns down due to a faulty Chinese Export, well it was uncertified so tough shit.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
He saw something and there was a dull thud. They decided it must be a drone because that's a lot more exciting.
No, they've said that such collisions could result in a loss of life.
This drone apparently hit the plane's nose. If it were an engine intake at a critical moment, the story could be quite different. It happens occasionally with bird strikes, and it can happen with drones, that an incident will cause significant damage.
One key difference between birds and drones, though, is that birds tend to avoid aircraft. Stupid humans, on the other hand, tend to do ever-dumber things without realizing the risks they're causing. Current drones are usually small, lightweight, plastic little things... but there are plenty of larger kits out there, and improving battery technology is making it cheaper and easier to pose a real threat. The age of rare aviation is over, and now everyone can put an obstacle into the flight path if they want to, without even realizing that there's a danger to others.
It's a careful balance to be struck... Little Bobby's 6-ounce toy isn't a risk, but if Bobby starts flying a drone at age 10 without any limits, he won't be expecting limits when he flies a 20-pound drone at age 20. Trying to record the neighbor girl sunbathing might be rude, but trying to record the takeoff of an approaching single-engine airplane might be deadly.
That's the concern for lawmakers and airlines. Current technology and incidents present only annoyances for pilots, but now is the time to start thinking about regulation, and hopefully lay out reasonable limits. Don't wait until after the first deadly drone strike, when all the politicians bring their knee-jerk reactions.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Oh, yes, definitely, the manual for the Chinese drone should include all the relevant air safety laws for your location. Just like my Japanese Supra came with a copy of the California Driver Handbook. Oh, wait, it did not!
Knowing the applicable laws is the user's responsibility. The drone's documentation should contain what's applicable to the drone, not a compendium of all laws governing the use of airspace from the North to the South pole. Even if the local regulations required that the relevant laws are included with the drone, it would be probably left to the local distributor to do so.
No good deed goes unpunished...
On most products, such warning labels aren't there to inform users; they're there to give vendor a legal pass in case user does something stupid.
On electrical equipment: "do not submerge in water", "do not operate when cord is damaged". On something that uses (open) flame: "do not place near curtains or other combustible items". On a plastic bag: "do not eat". Or anything along those lines. Come on... Darwin takes care of that. The labels are there so vendor can say "well we did warn the users!".
Which is exactly the reason such warnings are often missing from gear that people buy directly from China. The vendor doesn't care. By the time something goes wrong, they've already moved on & changed company name a few times.
1) The first rule of DDD: drones cannot cause any problem ever in any situation.
2) The second rule of DDD: always defend drones as harmless no matter what the circumstance. For example if firefighters call off aerial retardant drops because drones are flying in the fire zone: the missed drops didn't make any difference and/or drones didn't pose any interference and the authorities should have just kept flying.
In the current post three of the major denial themes are stated.
1) It wasn't a drone.
2) If there was a drone, nothing happened.
3) If there was a drone interaction, there was no actual damage.
It's so simple even the dullest of Slashdot Pundits can execute it with ease.
BTW, I've actually participated in a project with the FAA addressing bird strike mitigation. They take any physical impact on a aircraft very seriously. It's not just birds, but any strike by FOD (Foreign Object Debris). That includes anything on a runway, like trash. At DFW airport in Texas, they have a problem with foxes who live in the airport and are stuck by aircraft. They collect and monitor the corpses, and have a burial location for their bodies. The FAA has records of rodent strikes, when their carcasses are found on runways. Anything hitting a aircraft is considered very significant. Saying that it's not important is just a pledge of allegiance to the DDD. A true blue cult member.
Why is Snark Required?
And, do you really think that if someone wants to use a drone to try crashing a plane, the regulation is going to stop them?
Might as well take that stupid "murder" law off the books as well, then, eh?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Warning: This ladder is not a flotation device.
"His name was James Damore."
Totally wrong. Pilots regularly train for engine failures at all stages of takeoff, and unless spectacularly mishandled, does NOT lead to the plane crashing.
Also, losing an engine in cruise does NOT cause the a/c to start losing altitude quickly. Sure, you'll have to drift down to a single engine cruise altitude but it's not nearly as harsh as the poster seems to think.
Even commercial airplaines start against the wind if possible, so the layout of an airport is always with the landing stripe in the main wind direction. If that's not possible, airports have at least a second landing stripe at an angle to the first one, and they choose the landing stripe that is as close as possible to the current wind.
This is bullshit. All you have to do is park your car on the side of the highway close to the teavel lane to experience the extreme buffeting that shakes the entire car as every single vehicle goes by at high speed 6 feet away.
Yes, as the vehicle passes, not before it gets there. I see why you didn't log in, son.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
All bets are off when we live in a world where "WARNING: Contains peanuts" is a thing on containers of peanut butter.
Method of processing duck feet
Unless you're china airlines flight 006:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Note: It SHOULDN'T cause that, no. But it has happened and could again. Failures during flight could cascade to worse events, and have before.
-=Lothsahn=-
"and unless spectacularly mishandled, does NOT lead to the plane crashing."
Yes, because when a man-made object hits your engine and causes it to pretty much blow apart in a terribly unpredictable way in a crowded airfield during one of the most sensitive parts of the flight, mishandling by the pilot is obviously going to be fault of any crash...
A point of comparison:
- based on TNT content a hand grenade release between 400 and 800kJ when exploding. (example of source)
- unit conversion: 1Wh battery = 3.6 kJ (and 1Ah or 1000mAh x 3.7 V = 3.7 Wh = 13.3 kJ)
So your garden variety ~3000mAh LiPo "18650" 3.7V cell holds a little bit under 40kJ.
Your laptop long life 9-cell 8900mAh battery pack holds a little bit under 100Wh or nearly 360kJ, about the same ballpark range as a smaller grenade (hence the xkcd comic).
A long-ranged drone's (e.g.) 6s high voltage (= 6* 3.7V = 22V) 16000mah is 355 Wh or a whoping 1.2 MJ.
This drone has a battery that gives of the same range of energy as two hand grenades.
Yup, this is dwarfed buy the combustion of kerosene: 1 liter gives of 37 Mj (or about the same as pile of about a thousand "18650" batteries - fuel is still a denser energy storage than lithium). And the combustion chamber of the jet engine will probably not even notice if a puny little drone battery went "poof" inside.
The thing is, an air-plane is far more than just the interior of the jet engine's combustion chamber.
And there are a lot of parts of that air-plane that wont appreciate the explosion of a drone battery.
Think of it, if you need to test it by throwing chicken at it (ball park estimate: an average chicken weights ~2.5 kg. I use an approximate speed difference of 500km/h. That gives us Ecin = 1/2mv^2 = about 25 kJ of cinetic energy), an air-plane is going to take some damage from the equivalent of 2 hand grenades lobed at it.
A single drone impact won't cause the plane to sustain a catastophic hull failure (as TFA points out, the plane successfully landed safely afterwards), but it's certainly going to do a lot more damage that fowl.
When ingested by the engine, even if combustion chamber won't suffer much, the turbine is going to take quite some damage.
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This may surprise you, but birds that are not predators do in fact weigh much more than a drone. A canadian goose is 7-14 pounds and yes they DO fly, in fact they fiy a lot! One of the larger drones, the DJI - Phantom 3, weighs 1280g (just battery and propellers) - 2.82 pounds. You can't add much more than a pound in payload, so it's significantly lighter than a goose.
The reason geese are the reference for birdstrikes as they are by far the most common problem for planes hitting birds because there are so many of them in flight during migration at altitudes that can easily mess with landing/takeoff..
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